I’ve seen many engineers that work in the entertainment industry value engineering over content. But to me, the tech is in the service of the content. Or in other words, I think that content is first. Because without it the tech, while interesting, is purposeless.

When there’s a scene that’s meant to evoke physical hugeness (say, a establishing shot of a spaceship battle of massive ships), movies do 3D. But they should NOT, cause parallax immediately informs of smallness, and so all the elements feel tiny, achieving the exact opposite of what’s intended.

Then, when jumping to the actual close/over-the-shoulder dialog shot, the 3D is gone for some reason. However, that’s when you need it the most, when parallax and proximity matters, when you want to create a sense of intimacy (within reasonable margins to prevent discomfort to the audience)

Of course, it all boils down to the fact that the 3D department works on their own separated from production, and also to technical reasons. For example, spaceships are CG, and therefore 3D at source, so getting a depth-image from the composition team is easy. So the 3D department (which doesn’t talk to the 2D cinematographer) adds 3D effect to that shot (breaking its intent) and goes home thinking they did a great job. Meanwhile, live action footage (characters closeup) doesn’t come from the CG department, and so it comes without depth information. Therefore doing stereo/3D is more difficult and usually avoided, despite those shots are, if anywhere, where the 3D should be applied.

Another technical mistake is that the film industry still hasn’t learn to apply 3D in physical units (meters or inches) not in “pixels”. If they did so, the 3D/stereo effect would adjust automatically to each shot without much art direction needed (besides tweaks).

As a result, in today’s films grandiosity gets caricatured by 3D, and opportunities for intimacy wasted. They should learn 3D is not a popcorn selling feature meant to put a spaceship in your face, but a tool of the medium, like lighting of focal length or composition, and they should use it accordingly.

And it’s being 7 years since 3D arrived to our cinemas. You’d think they’d have learnt by now.

The monitor’s color space, the OS’s color space, the photo editing’s color space, the picture’s embedded color space. Of course, this photo looks nothing like what I expected. These color spacing thing was all a bad idea. Can we revert the last 20 years worth of color tech?

I think the fact people seem to fear AI so much and assume it will take over and get us to extinction rather than care and love us, is probably just a new and modernized form of the sentiment of original guilt.

To me, the sentiment acknowledges that we humans are assholes and that we know it. And that consequently we fear that sooner or later we will have to pay for it in some way. The punishment used to come from our father, back in times of infantile/religious thinking, and it comes form our own child these days, it seems.

More interestingly, this fear builds upon assuming that this AI will operate according to values and needs similar to those of humans (such love or self-preservation), which is a very narrow, self-reflective and arrogant way of projecting the nature of something that is bigger than us. Basically, we are assuming the AI will behave in an asshole way (destroying the less developed been) just as _we_ have been doing ourselves forever in history.

I read in the Wikipedia “The 1979 Moon Agreement was created to restrict the exploitation of the Moon’s resources by any single nation, but as of 2014, it has been signed and ratified by only 16 nations, none of which engages in self-launched human space exploration or has plans to do so”.

Garbage Collection (in programming languages) is like the hotel housekeeping service. Conveniently clean after your mess every day for you while you are out… but frequently disrupt the most inopportune times as well